Bill Gates Buys Stake in Spain’s FCC as Economy Recovers

Microsoft Corp. founder Bill Gates recaptured the title of the world’s richest person in May from Mexican investor Carlos Slim, as the software maker hit a five-year high. Photographer: Jin Lee/Bloomberg

Gates, the world’s richest man according to the Bloomberg
Billionaires Index, paid 113.5 million euros ($155 million) for
a 5.7 percent holding, the Barcelona-based company said in a
statement yesterday. FCC gained as much as 13 percent in Madrid
trading to the highest price in more than 18 months.

Spanish assets such as FCC, a construction company with
water and waste-management operations, are luring investors as
the country’s economy exited a two-year recession in the third
quarter, according to government estimates. Spain’s extra
borrowing costs compared with Germany’s have more than halved
from their peak. As foreign investors return to Spain’s bond and
equity markets, the main Ibex-35 share index has risen 23
percent this year.

“The positive structural changes in Spain are far more
evident than in other countries such as Portugal or Greece,”
Francisco Salvador, a Madrid-based analyst at FGA/MG Valores,
said by phone. “If Spain were a company, it would be a
restructuring story similar to that of FCC, and investors
usually like those stories.”

FCC said today that another institutional investor bought
0.26 percent.

The stock gained as much as 2.08 euros to 17.75 euros and
ended trading in Madrid up 8.3 percent, valuing it at 2.2
billion euros. Before today, the stock had gained 67 percent
this year.

Richest Person

Gates, the 57-year-old co-founder of Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft, recaptured the title of the world’s richest
person in May from Mexican investor Carlos Slim, as the software
maker hit a five-year high. His fortune is valued at about $75
billion.

Gates still owns a stake in Microsoft and his portfolio
also includes Ecolab Inc., a St. Paul, Minnesota-based provider
of sanitation and health services, as well as Phoenix-based
waste disposal company Republic Services Inc. and Montreal-based
Canadian National Railway.

To reduce debt, FCC has been shedding several assets. The
company in June agreed to sell its stake in the water and waste-management company Proactiva Medio Ambiente to Veolia
Environnement SA. In July, is said it will sell 49 percent of
its Czech water unit SmVak to Mitsui Co.

Spanish Deals

The Spanish government says the economy is now growing
after shrinking for nine quarters in a row. As a result,
investors are looking for ways to profit from a Spanish property
crash that left the banking industry with more than 180 billion
euros of soured loans linked to real estate and lenders with the
task of managing property on their books.

Spain’s La Caixa financial group in September agreed to
sell a 51 percent stake in its real-estate servicing company to
private-equity firm TPG.

Also last month, Apollo Global Management LLC agreed to buy
Evo Banco, a unit of nationalized Spanish lender NCG Banco SA.
The deal marked the first foreign private-equity acquisition of
a Spanish bank since the nation agreed to a 100 billion-euro
European bailout for its financial system and created a bad bank
to remove soured real estate assets from lenders’ books.

Even with a growing economy, Spain’s property market slump
is still deep. House sales fell 15 percent in August from a year
earlier and home-mortgage approvals fell an annual 43 percent in
July, according to Spain’s National Statistics Institute.